UPCOMING EVENTS

DCHQ, a startup with software for automating the deployment of applications packaged up into containers, today announced that it can now run atop public clouds, not just companies’ on-premises data centers.

Companies can now run the software on clouds like Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine, IBM SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace.

DCHQ’s product launch today, which follows the news of an on-premises edition, arrives as companies are trying to figure out how best to run applications in containers instead of on more traditional virtual machines. The startup’s approach is to let companies deploy apps in containers while using the tooling that’s already familiar to them.

“We made sure to provide a very intuitive way of doing application modeling that’s UI-based and doesn’t require any sort of previous knowledge of Dockerfiles or Docker in general,” DCHQ founder and chief executive Amjad Afanah told VentureBeat in an interview.

In addition to exposing a user interface, DCHQ allows users to enter shell scripts for the infrastructure they want to use.

“Unlike other automation tools, you’re able to change containers at request time and post provision as well,” said Afanah, who has previously held senior product management roles at Oracle and VMware.

DCHQ’s software can actually do a whole bunch of things: model, deploy, back up, update, scale out, and monitor applications in containers. The tool can integrate with GitHub, Jenkins, Weave, and Docker Hub.

Given its wide range of capabilities, DCHQ falls in with a group of startups with software for managing containers in various ways. Rancher Labs, C3DNA, and Sysdig come to mind. Docker, the very company that has popularized the development and deployment of applications in containers, is also building tools for working with containers.

San Francisco-based DCHQ was part of Silicon Valley accelerator 500 Startup’s 12th batch. Its beta program included around 35 companies, Afanah said.